Very bad & some good news about coal....

Today's post: Wednesday, 8-26-2009

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

In addition, the United States will not be in as good a position as might be desirable when that happens. A recent story says that China has been buying oil supplies and reserves world wide and on a large scale.

So, taken together, it’s quite clear that we need to find ways to use much less oil without harming our economy and begin to really expedite doing so.

In part because of this and because of the increasing importance of electricity generation in our modern economy, in the United States and particularly in China, we have been burning a lot of coal to generate electricity and adding new coal burning plants.

This is releasing huge amounts of pollution from burning coal and is the largest single largest cause of global warming caused by increases in CO2 emissions.

And, in China, the increase in coal burning has been on such a large scale that it is causing serious health problems from particulates and is reducing sunlight enough to harm the potential for solar energy and to produce reduced agricultural yields.

Recently, I’ve gotten both some horribly bad and even frightening news and some much better and more promising news about coal.

Here’s the horribly bad and even frightening news first.:

In the health news in the last few days I saw a story twice that reported research that the inorganic mercury detected in women in their blood went from “two percent of women in the 1999-2000 study” to “30 percent of women studied in 2005-2006.”

And, one story noted that the rate of mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants was driving this by dramatically increasing the amount of mercury emissions into the atmosphere.

Since mercury tends to harm nerve development in unborn children and children as they grow up and to trigger mental decline in older people, this is an extremely serious concern.

The news that this problem got 15 times worse in just 7 years is truly scary.

Taken together, this set of facts means that our current method of burning coal is extremely undesirable. In fact, that may be an understatement!

At the same time, a huge part of our economy is now powered by the electricity we get by burning coal. And, we don’t yet have the renewable or even nuclear resources in place to substitute for it.

That literally puts us into a nearly no win situation. The status quo will ruin our health, our agriculture, and our ability to think and remember; but stopping all coal burning immediately would totally crash our economy world wide.

There has been some talk of sequestering CO2 by storing it underground. It is even being tried. And, in controlling the exhaust gases to do this, it may become considerably more economic to remove the particulate pollution and to sequester the mercury emissions than it would be if we weren’t adding this exhaust gas processing equipment necessary for sequestering CO2.

The bad news in that is that there is no guarantee the CO2 will stay underground without escaping; and we may simply not have enough places to store all the CO2 this method would need to store to be a real solution.

However, I’ve noted that it may be possible to use all the CO2 generated by burning coal to feed algae that would then be harvested to make biofuels and substitute for oil.

And, just as in the other kind of CO2 sequestration, in controlling the exhaust gases to do this, it may become considerably more economic to remove the particulate pollution and to sequester the mercury emissions than it would be if we weren’t adding this exhaust gas processing equipment necessary for sequestering CO2.

In fact, to protect the algae from being harmed, it may be mandatory to remove these pollutants before the exhaust reaches the algae.

Since we still would release the CO2 when those biofuels are burned, it’s clear to me that this would be a temporary solution.

But since we don’t yet have virtually every car and truck running as all electric vehicles or as plug-in hybrids, we still have quite a bit of coal, and we are running out of oil – plus we don’t yet have renewable and nuclear electricity generation in place sufficient to replace coal, it looks as if making biofuels with algae fed from the CO2 created by burning coal may be an extremely good near term solution.

This biofuel sequestration would solve several problems now while we await those changes. And, even better, its rapid, world-wide, and universal adoption would put a screeching halt to mercury and particulate pollution of our atmosphere.

That means that a proven way to covert CO2 from coal burning plants to biofuels using algae would be hugely valuable.

The much better and more promising news is that we may already have that under successful development.

While reviewing green energy stories listed in Nanosolar’s news section on its website, I found an article from the February 25, 2009 of Politico called, “Whither energy industry's Bill Gates?” written by Erika Lovley.

One of the parts of that story covered a very promising effort to make and begin to roll out biofuel sequestration of CO2.

A company called Ternion Bio Industries co-founded by Kyle McCue and Chris Schuring
recently built a full-scale industrial pilot reactor in California.

They just managed in time to lobby for stimulus funds for carbon capture and sequestration technology by using algae carbon capture to make biofuels.

The story then said this:

“With the help of stimulus funds, McCue estimates he can have a full carbon capture demonstration built in about 18 months that could capture nearly all the emissions of a mid-sized, coal-fired power plant.”

I then went to their website at: http://www.ternionbio.com & found this:

http://www.ternionbio.com/ternion-bios-technology //

"Closed-loop bioreactors are not subject to weather changes (heavy rain, snow, heat, freezing, etc.) or contamination (from pollution, rogue algae species or wind-borne contaminants)."

“Ternion Bio Industries has created a number of innovative technologies designed to optimize both maximum CO2 recycling capability and maximum algae output, while also operating significantly more cost-effectively and efficiently than other algae recycling systems.”

“For recycling greenhouse gases, Ternion Bio’s primary technology advances are contained in our Photo BioReactor.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Ternion Bio will be the number one company in this space when this industry is farther along or that rolling out using algae carbon capture to make biofuels world-wide and universally used can be done in 5 years as is needed.

But it does mean that at least one company sounds like it may be able to do the job. And, if that’s accurate and we follow up on it well, it will help enormously to clean up our air, use less petroleum for fuels, and reduce CO2 emissions. It will enable us to use oil more slowly; and it will help hold down the run up in oil and gasoline prices that we will have if it isn’t used.

It will enable us to more safely continue to burn coal to make electricity while we do not yet have substitutes in place. Lastly, it will help preserve the jobs and economies in regions that mine coal and soften the transition for them. And, it will have similar value for the coal companies.